Minktales

Issue 4

"Owner of a Boring Heart"

Minerva Mink sighed as she opened her diary in the mid-afternoon of the second day of July. On another day, she might have easily sung one minute, and sighed over her troubles the next, but she was feeling particularly down, as if the routine of her life had become too... well, too routine. Day after day, nothing ever changed for her. It was just the same old stuff all over again.

"Dear Diary" she penned aloud, "Today has been one long, lonely bore. It's at times like these, when I suffer the pains of having no one to really confide in, that I wish with all my heart for my dreams to come true, and for a handsome, rich, interested young man to take me away from this type of average pond-side comfort and style, and into a life of true glamor."

"But," she continued writing, "when weeks pass, and no one with those rare qualities appears, even a breathtaking girl like myself begins to feel lost and alone. There are days, truthfully, when I would accept anyone with cash and sincerity, regardless of physical appearance. A sad thing to have to admit, but there is nothing in a relationship that could be worse than loneliness. Your faithful servant, Minerva Mink."

"Well, it's still too early to give up hope completely, I suppose." Minerva thought, as she locked her diary with her little, golden key again, and put it in a drawer in her vanity, then dropped the key into the usual place inside her dress, and stepped outside, to cheers and whistles from the male animals of the local pond, followed by many loud walloping noises, and explosions from the pond's female denizens. Normally, Minerva might have acted casual, while enjoying the attention, but she had a party to attend that night.


"What were you thinking, Trudy?" Annette asked, "How could you invite Minerva? This is supposed to be a party for fun, to meet one another's friends! How could you go and spoil it like that?"

"Minerva's my best friend," Trudy said, trying to defend her actions, "and she'd know if there was a party I didn't invite her to."

"Maybe next time, I won't tell you when we're having a party, so the rest of us can actually get some attention from the guests. As soon as Minerva gets here, everyone else is going to be a wallflower, as usual! I hope you're proud of yourself, Trudy. Watch the so-called 'matchmaking' this party will create."

The "party" attracted, as it turned out, sixteen girls and about fourteen guys, but of the fourteen, only one seemed to have eyes for anything or anybody but Minerva the moment she entered, and only, presumably, because he was facing the other way.

"Hi everyone!" Minerva exclaimed, as she stepped slowly forward in one of her best party dresses, which couldn't have made things any easier on the guys at the party, and was probably considered, by many of the girls, to be just plain showing off. When it was just-girl meetings, Minerva was a welcome addition, and even seen as a ringleader at times, among the district's fashionable ladies, but for obvious reasons, no girl in town cared for her company when there were attractive guys around.

Many of the guys at that party were considered to be attractive, and a few were not, but as usual, they fell, on average, at her feet, not just from attraction, but because after spending five minutes around Minerva, not one had enough of their own will left to even stand up properly. All they could feel was the power of love that seemed to be using the gorgeous, golden-haired mink as its very nexus. Some had even fainted from the mere intensity of the emotion that they felt over her.

In the end, there was only one man at that party who really drew Minerva's interest, although several seemed (by her well-elevated standards) to be marginally attractive. The man who drew her attention was the unusual one. For ten minutes, she'd been at the party, and he'd never even cast her a glance, which was strange behavior for any man, to say the least.

"I wonder if he's a statue, or a robot, or a woman in disguise." Minerva thought silently at first, but at the end of fifteen minutes, her curiosity got the better of her, and she got up off the cushions that the many men at the party had placed in a pile for her, leaving behind some of the dishes from the buffet that she'd requested they bring her, and the forlorn looks of the seven lovesick men who'd remained conscious and attentive, and ambled slowly over to the buffet table where the somewhat short, balding, but clearly very strong-willed man stood.

"Hello." she said slowly, "My name is Minerva, and I couldn't help but notice that you've sort of been... all alone over here."

"Hello, Minerva." the man replied, turning to look at her with a deeply vacant expression, and speaking in one of the flattest tones of voice that the young mink had ever heard, "It's really nice to meet you. I mean it. It's a real pleasure. My name is Francis Pumphandle, but everyone calls me Pip. Have you tried the peach cobbler? It's really something. I usually prefer my cobbler to be of the blueberry variety, but whoever made this peach kind did a great job."

"W-W-What about me?" Minerva burst out, worried that Pip would be able to go on talking and talking without ever paying her so much as a single compliment.

"You did a great job as well. I like the way you did your hair, and that dress is really something. In fact, I'd say you're just about the prettiest person I've ever met, and I've met some doozies. I remember one time, I met Sandy Sandford; this was back when her career was just getting off the ground, you understand, it was a long time ago."

Just like that, Pip Pumphandle had absorbed Minerva's wish, and made it part of a continual nightmare; integrating compliments flawlessly into his dull, monotone, long-winded and boring speech, and making even the nicest of compliments sound like algebraic formulas from a textbook.

"Yeesh!" Minerva said aloud as Pip continued to talk, regardless of her responses, "If I listen to you for more than five minutes, I could actually start finding compliments irritating. How horrible."

"I actually met her first when she was headed into a restaurant a few miles out from my home town. It was a chance sort of meeting, but I think she went there for the same reason I did. She definitely liked the bologna sandwiches. Bologna. Now there's an odd word. Everyone is familiar with bologna, but nobody ever uses the word bologna to mean the meat. They always say bologna whenever they think something is nonsense."

Deciding the best thing would just be to leave the party early, Minerva stepped outside...

...to find Francis Pumphandle standing right outside the exit, continuing to talk.

"I just prefer to use the word nonsense myself. It seems more respectful to the English language to use words for what they really mean."

"Now, now..." Minerva said, in as rough a voice as she could conjure up without yelling, "I know my astounding looks have you captivated, but no following, okay?"

"Getting back to bologna for a second, there's really a lot of things most people don't know about bologna."

Minerva was off and running down the street at as good a sprint as she dared in heels, leaving just over a dozen poor, innocent men to recover from their encounter with her, and the rest of her friends remaining at the party to play clean-up after the latest "Minerva fiasco" as they often called them.

However, around the next three corners that Minerva turned, there was Pip. It was strange, because in all the time she'd seen the creepy little fellow, he'd never once moved his legs, but he always seemed to be wherever she was going.

"For one thing, hardly anybody knows what bologna actually is. It's the same with a lot of other kinds of meat; pepperoni, and sausages, and hot dogs. I mean, you know some of the ingredients, but there are others that no one really knows..."

As she ran down the street, away from the center of town, Minerva could hear the whistles and heavy panting of three tall, strong-looking men when she passed by, and decided to pull her trump card on that mister "Pip." It might not work on him directly, but something had to be done.

"Excuse me, fellas." Minerva said slowly, with well-planned lip and shoulder motions, as she spoke, "There's this irritating little man following me. Do you think you could maybe stop him from talking somehow?"

"Anything for you, doll!" one of the men exclaimed enthusiastically, and the others seemed to agree. In only a moment, Minerva could hear Pip approaching.

"...course no one really wants to know those ingredients either, so it sort of all works itself out, but I've heard that some of those ingredients are truly vile."

Minerva might, under other circumstances, have winced at the sounds that drifted toward her moments later, but after what she'd just gone through, the sound of a struggle, and someone being tied up were like music to her ears, so she smiled broader, then continued the walk home, certain that many of the inhabitants of that side of town would get very little accomplished that evening as a result, when she heard a horrible noise.

"Of course, I don't really care what goes into a hot dog either, unless it's poisonous."

"AAAAGH!" screamed Minerva as she fled the town posthaste, too fast for anyone to see her, or follow. Normally, the attention of the other people in town would have been a source of amusement to her, but she didn't have time for amusement anymore. She had to get away from Pip.

At last, panting hard, and out of breath, Minerva waved aside the usual whistles, wild takes and other varied, assorted reactions of the local animals as she unlocked, then opened the door to her log house...

"So, I asked a friend of mine who knows all about hot dogs if any of the ingredients were poisonous, and he said 'no more than anything else,' which I think was his way of saying yes."

"How-how did you get in here?" Minerva shrieked, "Are you some kind of stalker or something?"

But by that point, Pip wasn't even responding to her. He was just sitting on her couch, continuing to talk, and as hard as she tried, she couldn't get him to leave. Minerva tried to pick him up, or tip him off the couch, but he seemed to be stuck to it somehow. She even tried holding the whole couch upside down and shaking it, but that produced no effect.

"Of course, you'd want someone to tell you if you were about to drink poison, so I told him it might be a good idea for someone to tell you when you're about to eat a hot dog. After taking some time to think about it, though, I'm pretty sure most people can identify a hot dog for themselves."

Minerva found she had the best results when trying to throw her whole couch out the front door, but Pip just sort of seemed to reappear in her home whenever she did that, so at last, depressed, defeated, and feeling absolutely helpless, Minerva Mink went into her bedroom and got dressed in her bathrobe, then started brushing her gleaming, white teeth, and her long, golden, perfect hair.

"I think the catch is when people put a hot dog into their mouths, and they're not really sure what's in it. You might solve the problem with a disclaimer on hot dog packages that says 'warning; all hot dogs are poisonous.' Of course, that might not solve the problem after all, and besides, I'm sure I wouldn't want to put that kind of a disclaimer on packaging if I were a hot dog marketing rep."

If nothing else, Pip was a good sport about being an unwelcome intruder. He sat on Minerva's couch all night, just talking and talking, never shutting up, and always in the same monotone voice about the most boring and disjointed stuff. When Minerva woke up the following morning, she was greeted, not by the twittering of birds and the sound of the waves in the pond, but by Pip's incessant, dry dialogue.

"But getting back to bologna, that restaurant was called the King Midas Sandwich Shop. King Midas was a character in a story who could turn things to gold just by touching them."

Minerva slowly, groggily got out of bed, tightened her belt around her bathrobe, and for the first time in her life, wondered if coffee might not be a bad idea. The very notion made her feel like slapping herself, but it did cross her mind. She eventually decided to have apple slices and some toast instead. Pip didn't request any. He just kept talking while she ate.

"Of course, that would cause all kinds of problems for you, because then you wouldn't really be able to eat anything, I guess, unless you could already eat gold, which is something a lot of people used to say that politicians did, but it's really just a saying. Presidents and senators can't really eat money."

Minerva had finished her breakfast quickly, but the spirits of song and dance weren't in her, and she could even, on some level, feel her natural attractiveness draining away. She checked the mirror on her vanity just to be safe, and she didn't notice too visible a difference, except for the bags under her eyes...

"But the King Midas Sandwich Shop does eat money, particularly if you go there often, as I used to. So I saw Sandy, who I recognized immediately, stepping out of that shop one day, just as I was walking down the street in a different direction, and as we passed by, within inches of each other, I could see she had a little paper bag with her, and I could just manage to catch the hint of the scent of Bologna."

"Well," Pip said, standing up and stretching, "It's been fun chatting with you. Good-bye."


Minerva sat on her bed in her bathrobe for several minutes after that, her baggy eyes almost as big as the eyes of the local animals got whenever she left the house, and staring straight ahead of her, even though there was nothing to stare at in that direction but a particularly nice floral wallpaper she'd picked out on a Wednesday long ago.

However, after several minutes had passed, she started to feel her old strength returning. The depression and disappointment she'd felt the previous day, even before going to the party were vanishing like a bad headache, and in their place, she was feeling deeply refreshed, as though she'd just given her emotional state some much-needed exercise, and it was feeling ready to get up and go again.

Before Minerva actually got up and did any of the singing or dancing that she definitely felt like doing, though, there was one thing more she needed to do indoors; one revelation she needed to act upon.

"Dear Diary," she was writing in moments, "Forget that last entry. I didn't know what I was talking about. There's lots of things worse than loneliness. Your faithful servant, Minerva Mink."

Then, just like that, she re-locked her diary, put it back in her vanity drawer, deposited the key into its normal location (that time within her bathrobe) and started to get dressed and brush her hair. It was going to be a very good day.

The End


Yeah, I know. It's kind of a cop-out to move into a crossover story so soon, but I couldn't help it. The idea of Pip stalking Minerva was just too good to pass up, and in the next issue, she'll meet yet another well-known animaniacs character as she seeks psychiatric help for her views on men, but can he help her find the truth while fighting with himself to resist her unnatural charm?